Light raises $30M and provides update on L16 multi-lens camera

Light, the startup that is developing the L16 multi-lens computational camera, has raised $30M in venture capital in a series C round of funding led by GV (formerly Google Ventures). The company says it will use the additional funds to scale its global supply chain in order to deal with customer demand.

The company has also announced some changes to the L16's specification after listening to feedback from its pre-order customers. Many voiced a preference for a wider angle of view at the short end of the zoom range, and the L16 will now provide a 28-150mm optical zoom equivalent instead of the initially announced 35-150mm.

Additionally, the camera will ship with 256GB of built-in memory instead of the 128GB listed in the original specifications. You can see the fully updated L16 specifications here and watch the video below to see how the prototype cameras are being manufactured.

Comments

This tech is going to be trickled down to cellphone cameras. That is the real reason behind it, to improve cellphone imagery. If it does the the compact camera will be obsolete. That is their stated purpose. To make most all cameras obsolete in five years. I doubt if they will knock out Pro DSLRS. Not at this early stage in the game, but it could open a whole new era in photography later. I think a lot depends on how far they can go with sensors and processing.

The concept reminds me of Lytro. Looking back, Lytro's greatest failing was the proprietary image format that wasn't conventionally viewable, let alone editable, outside of the Lytro web-based ecosystem. If Light wants to succeed with the L16, I'd advise them to offer RAW files that work well with Adobe software. Post processing needs to be the foremost consideration.

It's an interesting concept, much like a "light field camera," but the very fact that they're talking about built-in memory, let alone 256GB in memory, tells me that this company is going down the same road as Lytro. I suspect that the Light L16 will be offering up odd and scary large files, and for what purpose?

I wonder whether the decision of 28mm instead of 35mm is good in terms of image quality. The field of view of a 35mm lens would contain the field of view of four 70mm lenses. That's the concept how they improve the images computationally. A 35mm image would have been calculated via the data of five 35mm images and four 70mm images (each corner) + one 70mm image for the centre of the image. But the field of view of a 28 mm lens would contain the field of view of more than six(!) 70mm lenses. So I don't know how they want to do this.

I would guess they knock that 70mm down to a 56mm. But, they cant get virtual focus and aperture if they use all the lenses to cover 1 space, they need to vary some by aperture and focus to allow the correction in post. Maybe the blur is really one wide angle, cause the blur isn't a high res thing.

By the way I think one should not say that this camera has 28-150mm optical zoom. That's misleading. The 150mm lenses are used to capture more detail in for example 80mm images. But there are no lenses that can give the 150mm images more detail. So I guess a 150mm image will only have 13 megapixels instead of 52.

Interesting cool device! I was wondering which segment they are aiming at with this camera. I think the IQ will not be good enough to make advanced photographers switch from their FF DSLR's/mirroless. For $1699, it should perform a lot better than a nikon D5500/canon 750d / sony a6000... to make this category to switch. For P&S, it's way too expensive imo and since this segment wil mainly be taken by mobile phones which the IQ will be competitive by 2017 (release date for L16). Again interesting tech. and I'll be looking forward to L16 V3

I've been in product development of cameras and optics for 40 years and while their video is interesting, much of what they are showing are commonly found facilities in Asia for tooling, machining, circuit and lens manufacturing. Just a short part of it pertains to the assembly of their camera. So while many might be impressed to see some of the factory automation, it seems to be misleading in that they use it to promote their camera.

Im not convinced. Its a bit meh for me. Theres no doubt this is some pretty cool tech, but is it just that? Cool tech.For me personally capturing images is an immersive experience. No not exclusively but mostly. If i go out to take a picture and I pack my camera bag and head out to a location, I have made the effort, done research and am excited about capturing that perfect image.I will NEVER get that same immersion from the L16. Yes it will appeal to wealthy soccer moms who want to spend the money on a light, portable camera that could capture DSLR quality pics and yes maybe to photojournalists who are on location in the middle of a hot zone who can whip this out of their pocket instead of a (by comparison) bulky DSLR to take an image of something thats taking place 10 meters in front of them.In my opinion, L16 is not going to do anything to the DSLR market, if anything its competing with the point n shoot market. It could make an effective and interesting addition to a kit

I don't know, DSLR images can be pretty 3D if shot with light that helps a 3D look and shown of a suitable display device. (Oh and yes, I do have a Fuji 3D camera... it's great fun and shooting 3D has quite different requirements to 2D, but only limited subjects work really well.)

As interesting as the device is, as an optical computer, most photographers would rather shoot with a pinhole camera made from a discarded shoe-box. As for being as good as a DSLR, what does that mean? People don't buy DSLRs because of what they do technically (which most people don't know or care). People buy DSLRs because the best photographer in their family used one to take some cool photo. As maligned and forlorn as the family photographer is, it is them who lead the way in camera equipment. It is them who "Light" has ignored. Ironically, Light probably feels this is exactly the people they're building the camera for. Maybe it will succeed. But I get the sense it's a company ill with group-think. It's a company that doesn't truly love photography. It feels above it.

" People buy DSLRs because the best photographer in their family used one to take some cool photo. "Tell that to all the professional sports photographers, wildlife photographers, portrait photographers and others who use DSLRs to make their living. Condescension is fun, but often totally unjustified. And it often makes the user look ridiculous.

Hello Kawika. I am certainly condescending to "Light", but I don't see how I was condescending to professional photographers, as if they're not used to a lot worse ;) My point is that "people" who buy cameras in quantity, who aren't professional, won't buy a complex camera they don't understand and which, I believe, will output too much data for them to deal with. As for my looking ridiculous, that's the price I pay for opening my mouth!

I'll make predictions: They will have a very good base technological concept, but they will go the way of Lytro. They'll fail to execute. They'll build up a patent minescape and reputation which will make it hard for others to follow.

Actually Lytro was rather good at excution. The annonced a product and were shipping it quicker than some other camera manufactures (cough cough Sigma). Its just nobody really had a compelling use for it

future of flat camera bodies. But it still has to follow the law of physics. Sensor surface area is proportional to amount of photons collected. I see this as a future for cellphone cameras but not for normal cameras.

Having bought a Illum at the reduced price, and being unwilling to buy at the MSRP, I see the promise and problems Lytro was dealing with. The biggest problem is explaining to people that their camera was not a replacement for a DSLR, but something different. After watching Light's video, I'm not sure if it's closer to the Illum or a DSLR, and that uncertainty is something they need to tackle before the prosumer market will bite at the MSRP.

Keep in mind, Lytro had two consumer products. The "rectangular tube" was a toy. The Illum was a respectable device at, perhaps, the wrong price. I balked at it when it was the price of a mid-level Nikon DSLR, and picked it up when it was at the price of a mid-level Nikon lens.

@ZDman Lytro's product was atrociously bad. Proprietary files locked into a weird web service. It's not something I can see anyone sane ever using. I would have bought one if it had an open file format and worked with *some* standard photoediting program -- any one would do. Competent execution would be:

@photenth That's exactly the point. An array of small sensors can offer more surface area and a wider baseline than a single large sensor at much smaller size. Ten 1/2.3" sensors are quite competitive for low-light with a single APS sensor, but the overall system is about 1/10th the size.

Alphoid: You can edit them in Photoshop, though you'll need to do this in conjunction with their software if you're not just going to flatten them (and you don't want to, or you should have just used a DSLR in the first place).

You aren't required to host them on Lytro's web service.

Expecting existing lens mount lens to work well with a camera which is taking a "deep" shot is not reasonable. While I do wish that Lytro had committed to a removable lens system for the Illum, expecting them to marry themselves to someone else's mount system and then having to explain why only a small subset of those lenses would work well with the way their sensors are gathering data would effectively put off a good segment of the audience they were going for.

I'm not suggesting this is a replacement for a DSLR - it isn't - but your specific objections seem to be made outside of any experience with their devices. This is not a general purpose camera, but please don't set up straw men.

@Delusionn Any existing lens mount would work with 4-way lightfield pixels.9-way or 16-way, it would depend on the aperture and focal length of the lens, but it'd be possible to cover a good subset. And the fallback would be it acting a s4-way.

Nice concept, but I think this initial iteration will have trouble beating a $600 A6000 pancake zoom in both size and image quality. I think a RX100 III/IV will also give better quality and much cheaper price.

That depends on aperture and total sensor area. Specs don't say. But even 1/2.3" sensors would give similar total surface area, and I'd guess it's something like f/2 lenses. That would give potential for quite a bit better images.

After watching their video, it's very unlikely that one can assume the final image quality will be sum of the 16 sensor areas. Even at optimal focal length, only 5 (or 4 if you don't count overlap) cameras are used addictively (by stitching). At other situations, you will be thinking about 2-4 1/2.3'' sensors combining at best. I also doubt that those are 1/2.3'' sensors either. Maybe 1/3.2'' is my guess

Haha - like Nikon isn't even No.2 for FF anymore (Sony is) - but then again the dino-SLR is a dead end in photographic evolution. M43 is far ahead of C & N in digital technology - stills and video. Canon is far more likely to adapt and through sheer market size will survive. Nikon will probably fizzle out like Konica Minolta.

Ok, here's the thing...only 10 cameras capture the image, the rest of the modules capture for focus, light metering and so on. So, technically it does have 16 but only 10 are used for image capture. At least that is how I understand it?

It is curious they don't mention the overall dimensions in their specs. I estimate the diagonal length is 7.5 inches. So it isn't a small camera. That would make it somewhat larger than the Samsung Note 4.Impressive factory in China.

I'd rather take Nokia's solution with the Pureview where it takes a crop from a high resolution sensor for zooming. They just have to increase the system size by using an APSC high resolution sensor or a full frame 50MP sensor. An iteration will include image stabilization for slower shutter speeds and/or handheld HDR.

The math wont be that simple. It still has one screen, one set of core processing and memory etc. The camera's themselves are probably not the biggest power draw. Certainly *more* power needs, and processing all those frames will also draw more power. But not *16 as much.

@The Squire,I have done several power consumption measurements on the digital cameras I own to discover this :- Turning off the LCD screen and/or EVF does not necessarily means the liveview process is completely turned off or paused.- When the liveview process is still runing in the background, the overall power consumption is not significantly reduced when the screen is off.The consumption is not linked to the number of cores only, but also to the task load, clock frequency, etc ...)

Why is it 'reasonable? What is it based upon? The raison d'etre of this camera is to achieve something akin to 'DSLR quality' in a small[ish] form factor. If it doesn't do that then it has very little appeal. If that's the case, there really won't be any 'future generations' of this camera.

If the first iteration delivers smartphone quality images I would speculate most people would just buy a smartphone [the small number that don't already have one that is]. Or is that far too hypothetical?

It's based on samples of the prototype. Several samples of the prototype have a quality that is worse than the quality of top smartphones (noise, low dynamic range, ..) . So I guess that they used 1/4" sensors, but that's just a guess.The concept is promising, so I think there will be future generations no matter whether the first generation only has smartphone quality.By the way the video mode will only use one camera at a time.

I note they're using plastic lenses, which does imply severe limitations on resolving power which may account for the lack of critical sharpness. It's not possible to say definitively whether the high ISO images are a little smeary and blown in the highlights due to the lens or a smoothing algorithm, which is a bit frustrating.

I suppose it's possible that this will be more DSLR like in high ISO capability and limitation of DoF than it is with basic IQ and that may be enough to earn it a niche. Seems a shame the technology is potentially hobbled by the use of very cheap optical elements.

Even the Hassy is merely evolutionary, but making a (small) medium format camera into such a small body is cool. L16 is truly different, like how iPhone changed the way people take pictures. And it's easy to understand how it could work.

The images do not look that superior to your typical smartphone. The highlights in particular seem to be abruptly clipped in the London images leading to generally low DR. The low light images also do not look convincing (e.g. https://exposure.imgix.net/production/photos/qfpb9j1wclibpgb9632nggtzczbyb9xpz7os/original.jpg ). Although no ISO is known due to lack of EXIF data, judging by the scene it is probably ISO 1600-6400 which is not too demanding. It seems the performance is far from DSLR levels, however as these are not final version its best to reserve judgment.

I think they're doing a pretty good job of computationally integrating the image content from the cameras, with the only major strangeness showing around the highlights... which are largely blown anyway (this doesn't seem to be getting very good DR). I don't see this as a game changer, but I've been deeply involved in computational photography for some years; put another way, the game changed a while back, but maybe this will help make that fact obvious. ;-)

They almost had me reeled in with early advertising last year, but then they weren't actually for sale yet. You had to plunk down a lot of money for a pre-order with an indeterminate shipping date at least a year out. It's very hard to buy on pure faith for some of us.

I think it is small amount to put down, given the full price. They will for sure deliver, perhaps with delays, and it will for sure flop – many people do not realize how many things need to go right for a camera to be successful. This is why interesting ideas – like Sigma and Lytro – loose to less ambitious models.

Now this certainly looks fascinating. Anything that is good enough for the intelligence industry must be more than satisfactory for the everyday user. I am really looking forward to the launch of this camera. Somehow I think that this is the way things have to turn.The 2016 production has already been sold out.Nothing like this ever existed in the nature or elsewhere. This is a totally new concept where you bypass the laws of optics by the sheer amount of data collected.

This is easily the most ground breaking innovation in photography since the invention of the camera, more so than Lytro. Although I imagine Light could do Lytro. I have always wished it would become technologically possible to develop a pocket camera with the resolving power of a large sensor DSLR. This is it. And it works like nature, using a compound 'eye'.

@MrTikitsoLenses on DSLRs have many many elements.They're there for a reason.This camera's lenses will have very few elements.I doubt this camera will have the resolving power of a large sensor DSLR.So this will be like a fly's eye camera.We'll see how it pans out in real life.It is an interesting idea.BC

Human eye is more like DSLR – single lens, single focusing, single sensor. This is more like fly's eye. It is interesting to note that generally human eye produces better image, fly covers wider angle.

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